Animal Welfare Professionals

On Thursday, April 2, 2026, join Maddie's® Monthly Foster Connection at 12pm PT/3pm ET. Jordana Moerbe, Director of Lifesaving Partnerships and Medical Care at Austin Pets Alive!, will be discussing how animal shelters can shift from a kennel-centric medical model to a foster-centric clinic ... See More

Hi Augusta, Thank you for trying the plan and for sharing the observation because I actually think it highlights something important about the emotional side of kennel return. My impression is similar to yours: the food may have helped the dog enter the kennel, but the kennel itself may not yet have ... See More

Hi! We run a program called Shaina's Safe Haven, named after a volunteer who sadly passed away. The purpose of this program is to offer temporary foster care for people who are in a situation that does not allow them to care for their pets temporarily, such as a hospitalization, eviction, house fire, ... See More

The New York Times reported today that HUD is circulating an internal memo that would dramatically narrow Fair Housing Act protections for assistance animals. Emotional support animals would be largely excluded. Service animals would face tighter scrutiny too. The justification HUD is using is the ESA ... See More

Karen, the history you laid out is real and worth respecting. Spay/neuter is the biggest prevention win the field has ever produced. From 17 million dying in shelters in the 1980s to under 500,000 today, that is decades of work and it is the playbook everyone points to. Here is where I want to push ... See More

I couldn't agree more: prevention absolutely works better than repair. But what I'm seeing now in animal welfare isn't a field that hasn't figured out prevention. It's a field in crisis. And when people or systems are in crisis, prevention can become out of reach. For someone worried about their ... See More

Socially Conscious Sheltering is a real framework that came out of real practitioner experience trying to balance resource constraints with animal welfare commitments. The No Kill movement is also a real framework that came out of real practitioner experience trying to push the field past a euthanasia-default ... See More

Every AI tool I tried for my own nonprofit produced something that sounded like a regional auto insurance company. The donor thank-yous were generic. The grant LOIs needed three rewrites. The board update drafts had to be tossed. I spent the last six months figuring out what actually fixes that. The ... See More

H Kristina: As a foster, I completely understand that concern. I've worked to make Foster Kitten as affordable as possible at $2.99/month, while still providing secure cloud storage, offline persistence, health tracking, medical photo tagging, and AI-assisted tools for foster caregivers. Foster ... See More